


get to the river ‘fore I run too low

by ephemeraa



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Always Female Stiles Stilinski, Canon Compliant, Cis Female Stiles Stilinski, F/M, Female Stiles Stilinski, Genderswap, Mates, Mating, Soul Bond, Soulmates, The Hale Fire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-27
Updated: 2014-12-27
Packaged: 2018-03-03 19:19:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2877176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ephemeraa/pseuds/ephemeraa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She said to him, all breathy and fast, ‘“Just so you know-- I’m not afraid of you.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	get to the river ‘fore I run too low

**Author's Note:**

> I had this posted to a different account for a while, but I took it down. Felt like writing het sterek and this happened.
> 
> Title is from a Sea Wolf song
> 
> Compliant with Season 1 and 2

Derek only really felt sad for the first year.

What was left of all ten bodies was buried in the woods, and then the ashes of those burned too badly were scattered in spiral patterns around the graves. Laura placed their father’s shrunken and shriveled corpse beside their mother’s  because they were mated for life and would be mated together in death. It was sweaty and summer, shaking and dirty with death stink, sore hands from the shovels. She wept as they covered all the graves, as the smell of rot was shrouded by dirt. Their brothers and sisters and cousins and uncles and aunts and parents were gone. A hard pill to swallow; a wolf's whimper in their throats, fighting to get out past the anger. Derek was the most angry.

He beat his hands bloody on the front steps of their fucked up, burned up house.

“Stop that,” she said. She was stronger. He was weak. He thought nothing could ever compare to the intricate pains of killing Paige just a year previously, but he was wrong. Now he was torn down the middle again, blue eyes burning like ice behind the lids. This would go on and on and on and it would never ever stop.

Laura was stoic, hands on the back of her neck, and waiting with the car door open for him to gather the things he had left-- just a backpack filled with school supplies and gym clothes. It was late at night. Tomorrow, the sheriff would know that they had left the temporary foster home, and tonight was their window to get out of Beacon Hills. When they drove away, Derek covered his eyes with his hands. He didn’t look up until they were long past the welcome sign.

***

They spent the winter with another pack in Washington, where they used to spend some summers. They had no living relatives up there, only sympathetic friends of the family. They were a pure pack, like the Hales-- a family of wolves that took them in the way you take in lost people, handing them clothes that didn’t fit quite right, and food that was not as good as their aunt Sara’s. They lived on the outskirts of a forest, a few miles from the nearest town. The locals thought they were romani or travellers because their houses were shacks and trailers, connected by old christmas lights, but some packs build houses and some build communities. Their alpha was a companion of Derek’s mother, but his pack was set in stone, woven tight enough to support the weight of Laura and Derek, but strong enough that they would never really let them in. They shared a room in the basement of the Alpha’s house, the only big structure nearby. A rainy and cold Washington autumn raged outside.

On the full moons, they ran in the deep woods alone. Derek’s wolf wanted to hunt. He’d wake up with bunny fur in his teeth and blood on his hands and mouth, and by the new year his cheeks were fatter.

Laura wouldn’t sleep with him anymore. At home, the pups always slept together. Most of the time they would drag their mattresses to the living room, camp out in front of the television, and they would toss and turn, nuzzle and sleep warm together. Derek slept on a cot bed that the pack had dug out of some closet space. It was cold without Cora asleep on his legs, without his face hidden in someone’s hair, without the smell of his brother’s sweaty pits, even, which he never thought he’d miss.

Laura didn’t talk. She spent most of her time in the town nearby, sleeping over with random people that she smelled of the next day.

One night, lying in the dark, Derek asked,

“What are we going to do?”

“We’re doing it,” Laura replied.

“We’re not doing anything here.”

She let the silence go on.

***

The pack treated them with an aloofness, as guests only. Derek treated them even colder. One morning, Elsa, and old pack mother with wrinkles deep in her cheeks and long dogtooth earrings made him breakfast from a deer they had caught the night before. Before she handed him the steak and eggs, she held it close like a prize and said,

“Smile for me, boy. Show me them teeth.”

And he bared them for her, but didn’t smile. She plopped the plate down in front of him, dusted her hands.

“The light just gone right out of your eyes, innit?” she said, giving him the meat. “You got a nice set of fangs, though, honey.”

***

There was a girl in one of the trailers down the line who would follow him whenever he went running through the woods. She was younger than him, but old enough that she smelled like sex sometimes. She wore a skirt that kept getting snagged on branches, and boots that were too big to be running in.

“Leave me alone,” he told her one day when she running too close for comfort.

“These are my woods, you know. I live here.”

“I’m trying to run.”

“So am I.”

He started jogging again and of course she kept the pace until she was nearly beside him. He stared ahead, focused on every branch.

“My grandma said your house burned down.”

Derek tried to run faster, but she kept up.

“How’d that happen?”

Just one foot in front of the other.

“Was it someone dangerous?” she asked. “It was hunters, wasn’t it? We don’t have no hunters up here.”

Leaves, snow, mud. He wanted to tear down on all fours and dig his claws into the ground.

“I’d kill them,” she shouted from behind him. “If they did that to my pack, I’d kill them.”

Derek stopped and turned to face her, finally. She had the a kind of trembling bravery about her, like she was playing with a jack-in-the-box.

“What do you want?”

She stepped back. Her eyes were bright blue, but not in the sick way.

“Are you gonna kill them?”

Derek told her no with a note of finality.

She shrugged at him, fist tangled in her skirt. He stood there and caught his breath while she watched him. Her eyes felt uncomfortable on his skin, even more uncomfortable when he knew she was staring at his face, trying to meet his eyes. He struggled to think of something to say.

“There’s nothing to do here,” he said.

She rolled her eyes, knobbly knees spreading.

“Yeah there is.” Then she lifted her skirt up, bare below the waist, and his senses tingled. The longer he stared at her, the more disconnected he felt to his own body as it started to react. She came over to him, then took him over with her hands, pushed them down into the snow and the mud, tugged him out of his track pants. She was wet and warm, and they never kissed, but he came while biting into her shoulder enough that it bled.

He kept thinking-- even as she dropped herself down on him to do it again-- that Kate had been better.

***

****  
  


One morning, Laura came from town and handed Derek an envelope. She had split the inheritance and deposited it into an account for him. He stared at the numbers on the page and felt almost nothing, even though the zeros went on and on. She started to pack her things, and when he asked her where the fuck she was going, she said,

“I’m going south. I think it’s time I cleared out of here.”

“What?”

She kept packing her things calmly. He listened for a change in her heartbeat, but there was nothing.

“I’m coming with you, right?

She didn’t answer him and that was answer enough.

He lunged at her when her back was turned, hair splitting from his face and claws digging into her back. He threw her onto the ground and tried to snap at her throat, but she was stronger. She was so much stronger than him. She kicked and then clawed his thigh so deeply that it would take hours to heal.

“Stop it!” she growled. “Just stop it!”

He rolled off of her and squeezed his leg. The blood ran through his fingers,

“Fuck, Laura!”

She crawled quickly over to him and reached out for his face with one of her harsh hands. He pulled away from her, but then she grabbed his chin and forced him to look her in the eyes. He shook.

“Listen to me,” she said through her teeth. “We’re the last ones. You and me. It’s just you and me, and it doesn’t matter where we go, we’re blood, Derek. Fucking blood.”

And she bit her wrist until a thin stream of blood poured down it, and she pressed her hand into his wound. He growled and huffed. She kissed his head, held it to her chest. They were blood, but the Hales were dead. The Hales were gone.

And they could not be each other’s pack. He saw that now.

When he left a few days later, the girl that he’d been fucking, whose name was Corey, was the only one who hugged him goodbye. The old pack mother Elsa watched from her lawn chair as he got into the cheap chevy he bought in town. She pointed two fingers at him and pretended to pull a trigger.

***

He wasn’t sad the year he came back to Beacon Hills.

Angry, sure.

He burned hot thinking about vengeance. Mostly, though, he was angry at Laura for being dead. He didn’t expect her to ever die. He touched his leg where she’d clawed him that morning in Washington, years ago, when she’d said _we’re blood_ , and then marked herself inside his wounds. He would kill whoever did this. He would feel their skin tear in his hands and taste their blood. He would pick their flesh out of his claws and teeth.

Anger at himself transcended all that. He’d been in the plains of Canada when she died, so far away. It wasn’t the first time he wanted to rip his own heart out. He never stayed in one place for too long, and he never came home, even when Laura called asking for him to come and visit her, visit Uncle Peter. He found packs and hovels, places to hide or fuck. He never wanted be back here, but being back was almost cathartic, and he liked that feeling somehow. He liked it enough that he stayed in the old house, which was cracked and smelled like old char and death.

He buried Laura in a grave beside the house. He couldn’t remember where exactly the rest of his family was buried in the woods, and he didn’t want to dig around to find bones.

When Derek covers a grave, he wants it to stay covered.

So he dug a hole beside the house, and he tied a wolfsbane vein to her and walked in circles, let its poison tear away at him. The ritual was meant for alphas who could transform, so they could be their true selves in the afterlife. A few years ago, he stayed with a pack in Wyoming and they had buried their old alpha like this, weeping over the wolfsbane and the sadness. By the time he was done, his fangs pierced through his gums. She was a wolf, then, frozen in her fur and fully transformed. Even dead, she reminded him so much of his mother.

_When Derek covers a grave, he wants it to stay covered._

The kids dug her up, and called the police, and they took her to a morgue, where she was just a half-rotten, half-whole corpse. The anger was flush inside him after that. The police assumed that he was the one who ripped his sister in two and they eyed him like he was some sick dog waiting to be put down. They chained his arms behind his back and stuck him in the small cage of the cop car. He could of ripped the car to pieces. He could of ripped those kids to pieces.

Scott Mccall was a curse on him. Derek didn’t want the burden of a bitten when he was trying to find out what happened to Laura, but Scott was just a puppy, chasing his tail and scared, owned by the worse kind of alpha, relying on him to be a teacher. He was still the only one who could lead Derek to the monster so he was stuck with him, and by proxy, that spindly, hyper girl that was his friend. He had hardly thought about her twice.

That changed very fast.

That girl slipped into the front of the cop car that day.

The moment he scented her, so close to him, only the protective metal between them, he felt his stomach drop. He breathed her in deep.

She said to him, all breathy and fast, ‘“Just so you know-- I’m not afraid of you.”

But she didn’t know that Derek was afraid of her. Because her smell was something that ached in his torso, like he knew it. That meant something.

He pulled his face up and stared back at her, which made her heart hammer louder than before, and he watched her pulse twitch to life in her throat. She started to ask him about Laura like he’d killed her, and he knew that everyone else thought this as well, but he found a way to change the subject back to Scott and his stupid fucking lacrosse game. It was easy to distract her. He wanted her to get away from him before he could fixate on her scent, before he could start to notice the other things about her that made his wolf pace.

When her dad pulled her out of the car by the scruff of her neck, he exhaled. The air still stank of her. He didn’t want to breathe in again, but his lungs ached until he finally did. And her smell was still in the dense air of the car, filling him up full. He watched her talking to her dad with exaggerated gestures outside. His dick got hard and he bit the inside of his cheek until it stung, just to focus on something else.  

***

Derek has met two mates in his life.

He learned about the process from the pack he stayed with for a short while as a kid, right after he left Washington. They had mating ceremonies around fires that involved fucking under the moon, and they had stories of life bonds and marking, of eternity.

One of his mates was Paige. He remembered being lost in the craze of hormonal wolf years, and how almost every girl at his school made him sweat, but he also remembered how Paige’s music combined with her sweet, earthy smell made his stomach feel like it was being twisted. He hadn’t known what it felt like to scent a potential mate. His relationship with her was small and naive, and he told no one in his family about that stirring in his belly, the call that his wolf would make every time he held her hand. Their bond was unsealed, underdeveloped-- a pretty, new flower that was trampled on as soon as its pedals grew.

Killing her was something that every cell in his body rejected.

And Kate was not a potential mate. He scented her and smelled nothing but sex and rage, excitement in the breeze.

But the second one was a girl in Sacramento.

She was crying on a bus. He was staying in a terrible apartment somewhere, and hadn’t wanted to dip into his savings to buy a car, and she was sitting across from him on the public transit, trying to hide the little sniffles. He smelled it in her tears. He could have done something, maybe, been kind to her. He felt the overwhelming urge to wrap her in his arms, but instead he ran. He got off at the next stop and tried to burn the smell of her out with cigarettes. He thought about her from time to time, glad that he had escaped it.

Stiles was a third. He smelled it on her the moment she got into that cop car. He thought about her every day after, pinching himself hard when she popped into his mind, like negative association could fix it.

It was because he had larger things to worry about. It was like he was trying to drive in a blizzard and Stiles was the snow blocking the view. It irritated every part of him. Some inconsequential, boyish kid that meant nothing to his sister’s death or her killer was suddenly in the foreground.

He would come so hard while touching himself alone in the only room left standing in his old house, and then after, try to convince himself that he wasn’t thinking about her.

***

 

After Kate shot him, he wanted to skip Stiles all together. He wanted to find Scott.

With his arm burning and his whole body sagging, he found her scent in the parking lot. She drove a bright blue jeep and he stopped in front of it with his hand up. He was slipping, then, falling down and lost in the overwhelming black clouds that filled his vision.

He woke up to her hands on his face. Her voice sounded pleasant in his ears. It pulled him back to the daylight.

And sitting in her car, he felt a calm that he hadn’t felt before, despite having a hunter’s bullet lodged in his arm, and feeling like he was going to vomit up his organs.

Only she was so stubborn, and jumpy, and opposite to him. He couldn’t put a name to the conflict in his gut, he could only react to it with anger. He told her,

“I’m gonna rip your throat out. With my teeth.”

He hated Stiles and it showed. It was worse when she was in proximity to him, which is when he couldn’t decide if he wanted to tear her throat out or make himself small enough to fit inside the space between her long throat and her shoulder. When she was close, he knew what she was to him and he hated her for it.

He would not let himself have her. He would not let himself ruin her. He would not let her ruin him. .

 

***

If is family was alive, he would have met a mate around this age. They probably spend the early years fucking, would have a few kids while they were young, and then those kids would be pups that grew into the Hale pack, expanding it out. It was the cycle. Derek broke the cycle by fucking Kate Argent.

He broke the cycle and he broke the Hales. Everything had burned because of him.

When he killed Peter, the Hales became an endangered species.

Any good alpha would settle down with a mate and make a new pack from scratch, give into the longing to for babies and descendants. Only every time he pictured a mate, his heart flared in his chest with fear and dread. Stiles was stuck in his brain like some fucking tumour inside him.

Being an alpha meant he had power, finally. Real power. And it was primal how his wolf ached for a pack, for pups to lead and sleep next to. He looked at Stiles from afar, tossing balls with her lacrosse stick for Scott to catch, cracking dog jokes every two minutes. He imagined her swollen and heavy, carrying a Hale inside of her. A whine died in his throat as he tuned in the other direction.

Instead of staying pure, he went the rogue way. He turned his powers to others. He did it all wrong. All the packs that he’d traveled with in the past were adamant about biting the right people, making sure the pack stayed in control.

He bit, tasted blood, and sang a mantra in his head. The bite is a gift. The bite is a gift.

He watched Erica wake up in the morning, in his room where he’d taken her after, and she had more color to her cheeks than before, more strength in her muscles-- he could tell. She looked up at him, standing above her bed, and reached out to his ankles, holding on tentatively.

“Did it work?” she whispered. Her breath caught at the end of the sentence.

“It worked.”

And the smile that split her face made him believe that he wasn’t a monster for this.

His pack was a patchwork of broken kids, ones who were easy to convince, ones who were not reluctant like Scott. He told them to believe in him, to believe that he would be a good alpha, like a father or brother they never had. He believed it himself. He was turning a new leaf. He would be better than ever before and he would be fulfilled.

He could see the way Stiles watched him, fury behind her eyes, and disgust. She would never know that this was the only way.

***

The Kanima was still circling them when he slipped down to the bottom of the deep end. Water filled his mouth, so he closed it, and the blue went black all around him.

And suddenly, he felt himself being slowly dragged back to the surface. He choked on the air as his lips broke free from the water. using what little muscle ability the Kanima left him to tilt up his head. Beside him, she was breathing harsh, trying to steady herself, fumbling with a cell phone that was badly water damaged.

She was small, hardly keeping her head above water while supporting him with his arm slung around her shoulder, holding her down. Every now and then, Stiles would slip under and then burst back up, kicking and kicking.

“You can’t keep this up,” he told her through short breaths.

“You don’t trust me.”

“You don’t trust me, either,” he said.

“Yeah well…” she blew out water and air. “There’s still a...freaking lizard man trying to kill us, so--” She slipped under again and came back up. “Trust me when I say I’m not getting out of this water.”

He couldn’t move. It was sort of sick how Derek was the one dragging her down. He shouldn’t have let this happen. Her skin was getting red, her heart was wild, her breath short and scared. The sickly green skin of the Kanima flashed at the edge of his vision sometimes, keeping the fear even more alive and screaming then it already was. They said nothing for the first hour as she kept on, miraculously treading and he begged for his body to move, to move so he could grab her up, pull her to a dry place and keep her warm. Save themselves.

“I can’t--,” she would cough out. “I can’t do it-- I…” She stopped kicking, then, and the water swallowed them both as they began to sink.

“Stiles,” he said as the water filled his mouth.

When Scott pulled them from the water, she let out a ragged breath and collapsed, panting on the wet tiles beside him. He fell face down beside her, with her face inches from his. Unable to move, he just lay there and watched her watching him. Her eyes were brown, the most human color, the most human thing about her. She looked away when the Kanima screeched.

***

He went to her window that night. It was mostly out of abandon. His muscles were strange and tired from their momentary death and he felt like he needed to say something or do something to acknowledge Stiles, who could hardly walk to her jeep when they left the school.

He opened her window and stuck in his head, became enveloped in her smell which was a cross between the worst and best thing he’d ever scented.

“You better not be a goddamn lizard. I’m too tired to fight.” She was facing the other wall, turned on her side, twisted in her bedsheets.

“It’s me.”

“Yeah you’ve got a thing for sneaking in through people’s bedroom windows, don’t you?”

“I should go, you’re sleeping.”

“I’m awake, obviously, jackass. What happened?” She sighed, like Derek was one was one of her kids coming to her with a broken vase. “What’s wrong?”

He stepped into her room and moved toward her bed. She was sitting up, leaning against her headboard. In the dark, he could see all things. He could see how her small breasts were pressing against her threadbare shirt. He saw how she was sitting in her underwear, how she hadn’t shaved her legs in a long time, how the shirt was a bit too short to cover the skin of her stomach. She had a small mole below her belly button. He wondered what that skin felt like.

“Shit, you can see me, can’t you?” she said, and she reached for the sheats, pulling them over her legs.

“You’re forgetting that I live with Erica.”

He invited himself to sit beside her because his legs were still wobbling.

“Yeah but her ego is big enough to support those lady lumps.”

He could have said something like, “she has nothing on you,” but he bit his tongue hard. Instead he said,

“Thank you. For staying above the water tonight. You could have saved yourself a lot easier if you let me go.”

“Derek, come on,” she huffed. “Maybe you’re not Mother Theresa, but wasn’t going to watch you drown while I practiced my breaststrokes.”

“I won’t forget it.”

She looked awkward after that, taking her eyes away from him. She reached down and started to softly knead her leg, hissing in pain. He could see the muscles throbbing under her skin from the work out.

“Here,” he said, letting his hand hover over her leg. He looked at her questioningly and she moved her thigh toward him a little in response, eyebrow raised.

Her skin was soft and smelled like chlorine. He moved his fingers up and down the tendon in her calf, and then past her knee a little. His own heart started to thump when he did this, when he heard her pulse increase. He pressed harder and she sighed a little-- just a breath. He couldn’t stop from moving his hand to the back of her thigh, squeezing it and massaging it in circles. The wolf was posed in anticipation, and Derek was so caught up in the feel of this. It occurred to him that he might be the first person to ever touch this place on Stiles’s body, and the thought made his dick jump a little in his pants. His hand reached up and up, moulding her skin. He was close to her pelvis when she said,

“Derek…” On the edge of her breath. Everything in the room switched to red, switched to something deeper and more visceral.

“Do you want me to stop?” He couldn’t look at her. He just wanted to touch and nuzzle, and roll with her like wolves in the grass and the leaves. He did look up, though, hand posed on her hip at the edge of her underwear.

Biting her lip, she shook her head.

He rubbed his hand up to her stomach, watched it quiver as he did this, and swept his hand across her underwear. he moved in circles, not pressing, just softly feeling her whole pelvis, pulling her underwear slightly every time. Her breath was so quick. Soon he could smell her getting wet, getting warm.

Abandon. This was abandon. He wanted this. Maybe it didn’t have to mean anything, just him repaying a favor, trying to make a poor, tired girl feel good when she was hurting. He didn’t want to stop and he should have wanted to stop. The want was in the wrong place. He was achingly hard.

He slipped into her underwear and felt Stiles widen her legs a little. She turned her face away from him looking toward the door like someone might come through it. He could hear her dad snoring peacefully from somewhere in the house.

He dragged his fingers through her hair and then slipped them into her fold, making her breath hitch. He touched her clit carefully, slowly. He didn’t put his finger inside of her. He just kept on with small circles, moving faster and faster until she was twitching. It made terrible, wonderful little sounds come from her chest. She often was caught slurring words together in everyday speech in her spastic way, but now she couldn’t form a correct groan. He loved the sound of it. Her hand reached out and touched his neck, digging her nail into his shoulder.

“I...ugh...mmhhah,” she suddenly said-- and then she came fast and hard, and he stopped to watch her already tired legs tense and release, her eyes flutter, and her toes curl. She whimpered at the end, when he dragged his thumb across her clit one last time.

Her eyes stayed closed and her hand stayed resting on his shoulder. Her breath slowed. He pulled his hand from her underwear and touched her belly once more.

“Did that just happen?” she asked.

How badly he wanted to kiss her, to touch the rest of her body. He looked away and stood.

“Go to sleep,” he told her before he left.

***

Outside in the forest, he thumped his head against a tree viciously.

He sucked on his two fingers like a beast, and the taste of her come was a specific torture. He fully transformed, eyes burning and face splitting into the wolf as he held his fingers in his mouth. It was heroin.

He just wanted a taste.

He could keep this under control.

 

***

 

The second time he went to her house was the day after Erica’s funeral.

He waited alone, sitting still on Stiles’s bed while the sun went down, waiting for her to come home, or to not come home. He didn’t care that much. He wanted to be around her scent. He wanted to look at the things on her walls-- pictures of Scott and her, pictures of bands that he had never heard of.

When she did come through her bedroom door, it was dark out. She was still wearing a black dress that didn’t fit her right, and she stank like other people’s tears. She jumped a little, throwing her keys down and turning to see him.

“Jesus,” she cursed.

“I didn’t want to scare you.”

She kind of scoffed, but her heart wasn’t in it. She looked tired and worn out. She kept giving him sidelong glances and began to slip off her cardigan, then work her legs out of the tights she wore. She walked over to Derek and turned her back to him.

“Unzip,” she said.

He pulled it down to her lower back and he helped her worm her way out of the dress. It was too tight.

“I hate that thing.”

“It’s nice,” he said, smoothing the fabric in his hands. He’d never seen Stiles in a dress before. She looked at him confused because Derek never said nice things.

“It’s a funeral dress. Automatically gets categorized as _least favorite article of clothing_.” She walked around her room in her underwear, reaching in the dirty pile to pull out a familiar tank top. When she had slipped it over her head, she looked at him. “Why didn’t you come?”

“It wouldn’t have been right.”

He could practically smell the scent of Erica’s death on his hands still.

“She was your beta, though,” Stiles’s voice was wobbling. It made him want to rest his head in his hands “And why aren’t you at your place right now? Shouldn’t you be with your sister...I mean that’s gotta warrant a pretty big family reunion, don’t you think?”

Derek growled in frustration, shoving a hand through his hair violently. Stiles, in the other corner, took a step back. And he didn’t want to scare her, so he made himself smaller, slumped his shoulders and back until he was almost curling in on himself.

“Whoa there,” she said more softly. He listened to her footsteps coming toward the bed. Her weight settled beside him. “Don’t freak out.”

“I’m not freaking out.”

Not true. His insides were turning to scar tissue. Every organ and every part.

“Look…” she started. “I don’t know what...Derek, you just…” She huffed. “You should be with Boyd and Isaac right now, right? Or Cora, I mean Christ! She’s your long, lost sister...it’s like a friggen episode of _The Walton_ s.”

Stiles might not have understood because Derek couldn’t put it into words.

Truthfully, Cora scared him because she wasn’t small and squeaky with knotted hair and green pyjamas, a husky stuffed animal under her arm. She was not the Cora that lived inside of him, who had been running, laughing in his dreams and nightmares for ten years. Every time he thought about going back to where she was, he felt an uncomfortable dread. He hated himself for it. He should be relieved. He should be holding her close and telling her about the past ten years.

“I don’t know how to fix anything right now, and honestly, I give up for tonight. So you should just go home. I’ve got nothing,” she said.  

But she misunderstood. He wasn’t there for answers.

“I want to be here.”

She looked in his eyes, then shyly looked away. Her leg tapped against her bed nervously.

“Well...last time you came over you stuck your hand down my pants, so…”

He move his hand to her hip and slipped his thumb under her shirt a little.

“You liked it.”

Her foot tapping increased and she looked at him with her cheeks puffing out a little bit, like she was on the verge of boiling over with something, but it didn’t feel like desire or sex or any of those things-- it felt different, so he removed his hand. She burst up, arms flailing in the air.

“Come on!” she yelled. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Stiles--”

“No!” she shouted. “You can’t just act like I’m a pest for a year-- like you hate me, and then come in here in the middle of the night, without even _asking_ , by the way, and try to get into my pants. Stilinkis know when they’re getting played.”

“I’m not trying to--.” She interrupted him to let out a long string of sentences that rolled off each other.

“I’ve been going out of my freaking mind, you know that? Every time I’m in the same room as you I think, _I wonder if he remembers that time he got to third base_ , or I wonder if that was even Derek Hale, maybe it was some goddamn shape shifter, who knows? Did I hallucinate that shit? Or maybe you’re just really embarrassed because you had a moment of insanity and now you can’t take it back, or maybe it just wasn’t anything to you, I mean, I know wolves are kind of liberal with their junk, and it could have just been like shaking my hand or something.  I don’t know!”

He knew, deep inside, that he hated it when she doubted herself, when she acted like she wasn’t attractive or good, or worthy. Like she was pathetic and small. He knew that out of any of them, she was bigger, and she was better-- good in the way Scott was good.

“I think about it, Stiles, “ he said calmly. “You think I’d forget the way you sounded when you came?”

Her cheeks were flushed with color.

“What. Do. You. Want?” she bent toward him, gesticulating with every word.

If there had been a safety net, or a dam, or some kind structure inside of him-- it crumbled. It had been disintegrating  for a long time. The words came tumbling from his mouth.

“I want Erica to be alive. I want the Alphas to leave this territory.” He grabbed her wrist. “I want Laura to come back so she can see Cora one more time.” He pulled her down and she awkwardly, tentatively straddled his lap, her breath uneven with a certain kind of fear. “I want you,” he told her.

“Why?” Her face was so close to his. He smelled her deeply and the wolf wanted to run his tongue along her cheek and her neck. Derek couldn’t answer her. He held her close instead.

With her face, her lips, her little upturned nose so close, they shared breath and he felt her practically squirming in his lap. He braced her against him and fell backward, onto the bed, where she slid into his open arm and kept her face turned toward his. He brought up his legs and tangled his other hand in her hair, kept holding her like this while the breath got slower and slower, moving up onto the pillows. She was so nervous-- he could tell from every movement she made.

She asked him in a whisper,

“Why aren’t you kissing me?”

And he said,

“I’m scared to.”

When Erica went from missing to dead, the wolf had howled in pain the way it always did when death crushed it, but now it wasn’t feeling anything. It was empty. He was emptier than he’d ever been before. He couldn’t even feel glad for having Cora safe in his loft. Something was missing. Ignoring it was like trying to sleep when you weren’t tired, and he needed something to make him tired, to make him sleep in peace again.

He needed a mate.

They kissed once. It was light and barely there, but it was warm, and it was close.

And they slept like that through the whole night.

 

***

He learned fast that the things which always annoyed him about her were becoming his favorite parts. Like the way she was always startled by the smallest surprises-- a rogue movement of his hand would make her flail, and he realized it was especially funny when they were lying in her bed because she bounced up on her mattress, squeaking in surprise as his hand suddenly touched her hip.

He would take off her shirt and touch all the way up her stomach, feel the rise of soft, fat breasts with his eyes closed. She would watch him, follow his movements like a cat, too embarrassed to moan when he played with her nipples. Her chest rose and fell with fast, excited breath.

Nobody knew what he did with her on late nights or early mornings in her room, mostly, because his loft was always occupied.

Cora stayed with him in the end, and he swallowed down bitter taste of worry and left her alone because she was fitting in, anyway. She got along with Boyd and Isaac especially, who were always hanging around in the loft, reading books for their English classes or trying to figure out how Boyd’s Playstation hooked up to Derek’s TV. Erica’s absence always jolted him, so he left them alone as well.

Some days, he tried to track danger in the woods, following random trails that led to nowhere. He went to the abandoned bank again and again, sniffing out the already dissipated scent of the alpha pack and obsessing over the distinctions within it. There hadn’t been much of a change since figuring out that Duchalien wanted Scott. He told Stiles to keep an eye on him. He told her to keep Scott safe when she could. He didn’t have to tell her to be safe herself because the danger was something that she knew, something that was embedded in her as deep as Scott’s bite.

Stiles, despite all her lack of power, was good at keeping people safe. That was another thing that he liked. Even though her tenacity for getting involved in other people’s shit made him violently angry, it was a good thing, deep down.

He didn’t come to her room every day. She spent most of her time doing the usual routine. She went to school, still, and had homework, and her father, and friends to worry about like a normal teenager. He was an abnormality.

The weekends were theirs, though.

She was always asleep when he crawled through her window on Saturday mornings. Derek knew that the thought of someone watching her sleep would revolt her, so he would always wake her up by flopping into her bed, slithering into the warmth of it, or she would just roll over and snore against his arm for a while.

One morning, she was awake and naked, hair dripping wet from a shower while she looked for clean clothes to wear. It was too late to pretend that he wasn’t at her window-- she turned and saw him. Her arms haphazardly went to shield the view from him, but her left breast still showed.

“Maybe text me when you’re coming over next time.”

She bent and grabbed the nearest shirt, which only barely covered her bottom. He turned away while she changed, hopping into her room and closing the window.

“I thought you’d be sleeping. Sorry.”

“It’s-- I mean...whatever, you’ve seen it before, right?”

He turned and looked at her, pulling the underwear up her thighs.

“Yeah, I’ve seen it before.” He smiled at her.

She touched her lower belly and made a grimace while he kicked off his shoes and sat on her bed. He smelled that she was bleeding, which meant that she wouldn’t want him to touch her today, even if he didn’t mind. He didn’t expect her to say,

“You know...I was thinking...I mean, it’s not really all that fair that you get to waltz in here and see me naked all the time when, like, I’ve only ever seen you without a shirt. And Scott has seen you without a shirt. Actually everyone has seen you without a shirt. Not that I’m complaining, I mean, if I looked like you’d I’d probably have my tits out all day everyday, and like, I’m not saying other people can’t look at you without a shirt, either, because, like, I have no right to say who can and can’t see your, like, perfectly shaped abs--”

She cut her babbling off when he stood up and started to undo his belt buckle. She watched him with a strange, pleased, but embarrassed look on her face.

“Um...my dad’s gone all afternoon.” She ran a hand through her hair and kept watching him.

“Good.”

He pulled his shirt over his head, then slid his jeans off. Stiles bit her lip. Her cheeks were flushed, aroused and frustrated as he toyed with the idea of taking the rest off. He slipped his thumbs into the waistband of the boxer-briefs he was wearing.

“Have you ever seen this?”

Stiles played with the hem of her shirt, eyes intent on the place between his legs, only covered in a bit of black fabric.

“Scott showed me his dick once...when we were thirteen.”

“Did you show him anything?”

“He touched my boobs. And then it got really weird and he started crying, which made me start crying and we hugged and said we would never do that again.”

He laughed, despite himself. Most of the time, when he was touching her, or kissing her cunt, or watching her come, she made it laughable. She would embarrass herself someway and start to giggle about it, and he would be caught up in the wonderful confusion of arousal and humour as she tried to get back into the mood.

He kept smiling, raising his eyebrows at her as he pulled off his boxers. She grabbed the back of his neck.

“Definitely better than Scott’s,” she whispered.

He was half-hard only, but this was the most he’d shown her. His wolf felt a little proud, prancing around and trying to puff out his chest.

“Do you want me to get hard for you?” he asked her, putting a hand on his dick.

She swallowed and started to walk toward him.

“God, I get…way too horny on my period.”

His stomach tensed because she smelled so strongly like woman at that moment, sweet and heavy. She looked a little embarrassed, but they had been through this last month when she was too shy to say why she didn’t want him to go down on her, and he had to explain to her that he could smell her period coming days before she even knew. It was a wolf thing that didn’t faze anyone, because he’d grown up with wolves who had heat-rituals around hot coals and who openly celebrated a girl’s first new-moon time. He would lick her clean if she would allow it and the wolf would even enjoy it.

“Do you want to--?”

She just reached for him and the moment her long fingers touched him, he felt the blood rushing and the air get thicker around him.

“Sit,” she said, like she was commanding a dog.

She was usually shy about sex. The change made him stiffen. He followed her orders and perched on the edge of the bed as she kneeled in front of him.

“You don’t have to do anyth--”

“Shut up, Hale, I’m trying to blow you.”

He laughed a little.

“Okay.”

She started by moving her hand up and down, a fascinated look on her face. Every now and then, she looked up for approval. She said,

“I’ve seen porn, obviously...but I might be bad...at this.”

“Not possible.”

He heard the nervousness in her voice so he smoothed a hand through her hair.

She kissed his dick, all around the head and then down to where it met his pelvis. Her tongue tentatively tried tasting him. It felt like brilliant needles all over, everywhere she touched. She was slow about it, nervous, awkward with her teeth. When she pushed all of him into her mouth, her tongue and cheek hitting him on all sides, he hissed and told her,

“That’s it.”

She hummed a little. She tried sucking and then tightening her lips in places, her breath heavy through her nose. She stopped after a few minutes, when Derek was just starting to feel the airy, overwhelming sensation of tightening in his balls. She looked up,

“Tell me if you’re gonna…if you’re gonna come.”

“You don’t have to do this if--”

“No, I wanna know what it tastes like…but just let me know.”

He groaned a little because the imagery was enough to make him thrust toward her lips. She pulled him back into her mouth and the time away from her had made him closer, made it feel even better, as she tasted the precome and he breathed uneavenly. She gagged a little when she went too far, but then she started to use her hand to grip him and squeeze. He gasped as she sucked for too long on the head, and then her little, out of breath grunts made his chest expand and one hand tangled into her hair, the other in his own.

“I’m gonna come,” he said. “Ffffuck, I’m coming--”

He felt her pull back a little and then felt nothing else but the many waves and pulses of it, almost painful as he drained himself into her mouth. The wolf knew he was around a mate, so he kept coming even when she moved away from his dick. She touched him and he came into her hand, hissing and jerking at the sensation, jumping as spastically as Stiles when her hand move a millimeter on his dick. She muttered,

“Whoa.”

And when the chaos of it was finally slowing down, he fell back onto the bed, mildly embarrassed that he’d overwhelmed her like that. There was come on her hands and his thighs. He caught his breath and she came to sit beside him on the bed, holding her hands away from herself. For a long span of seconds, they didn’t say anything.

“Was I really that good?” she asked, holding up her come covered hand.

“Yeah…” He covered his face with both hands, exposed and filthy.

“Awww, oh my god,” she threw herself down beside him. “Don’t be embarrassed.”

He turned to look at her, one eyebrow raised.  

“It was really...really hot, trust me. Like hardcore porn hot.”

She kissed him and put her tongue in his mouth. He tasted himself on her. Then she put her head on his shoulder and brought her body in. She wiped her hand on his stomach a bit and laughed in her throat. He felt emptied, cleared, weightless like dust in the air. She did this to him and he was addicted to that feeling.

“It’s weird,” she said after a few moments.

“What is?”

“Last year, I would’ve laughed my ass off if someone told me Derek Hale would be naked in my bed.”

He stroked her forearm softly, feeling every follicle of hair move.

“And?” he said.

“And...it’s not funny now that you’re, like...here.  I don’t really get it, but I like you, you know.”

“I was an asshole.” He turned to press his forehead against hers. “But I like you, Stiles.”

“Trust me, I know,” she said, and she reached down and touched him, sticky and warm, between the legs.

***

Stiles began to smell more like him. That was a phase he hadn’t considered before, but now when he scented her hair, he found himself inside it with all the other things that lived there-- the pungent oil of her jeep, Scott’s piney scent, the medicinal tinge of adderall. She couldn’t notice it. Maybe the others could.

He thought about his mother and father who had been mated for years, and whose scent had converged into almost one. You couldn’t track her anywhere without finding him.

He pushed it to the back of his mind when he kissed into that hair.

***

One night, Cora sat on the floor with a box of Chinese food in front of her while Derek ate standing over the kitchen counter. It was late and they were tired from running silently through the woods all evening, tracking strange scents and prints in endless circles until they decided to give up. The silence between them had encompassed uncomfortable. It was now normal and complacent to sit with her in their shared space, and let communication pass between them with looks and nods of the chin. She didn’t like talking to him partly because she was angry at how the alpha situation was unravelling,  and partly because she found him disappointing in every facet-- a brother, an alpha, a hunter. He really couldn’t blame her.

The sound of her voice startled him when she said,

"So you and Stiles, huh?"

He stopped drinking the water in his hand. He heard his own tell tale heart jump in his chest, which meant she heard it, too, so excuses and lying would be arbitrary. He just looked away.

"It's just...I can smell it." She shrugged as if it was obvious.

"You're pretty good at that."

To know someone's scent-- to know every change and every part well enough that it was as understanding as seeing someone’s face-- took practice. His betas were still wading through the ability, always too terrorized by the onslaught of scents in order to separate them. Someone had to train the senses, guide you slowly through identifying the small simple things, to complex things, like a person.

"Don't worry. Isaac and Boyd aren't good enough to notice it," she said, taking a bite of her food.

If they were laying their cards on the table, he decided to push her.

"Who taught you to scent so well?" Who taught her to fight? Who taught her to survive the woods, to curb the moon, to be able to scent out the smallest bit of Stiles on his skin?

Cora sat forward. Her hand went nervously to her hair.

She was still a surprise to him, every time he saw her. Almost like she'd dropped out of the sky. She had not mentioned a name or a place, or an explanation for why she was not dead and buried in their old backyard, turned to bone or ash like their brother.

"Yvette and Daniel. They were nomads."

"And they raised you?" he asked, coming around the counter. He held back the urge to cross his arms.

"They taught me everything." She looked up at him seriously. Her lower lip wobbled a bit as she continued.

"Aunt Sara used to run with them when they lived in Beacon Hills. They had a pup with them, you probably remember her, she was always at the house."

"Chloe."  Pups and their parents were always passing through their house, looking for alliances or attempting to merge packs. He remembered that the little girl Chloe was more of a fixture, always sleeping in their beds and nuzzling up to the older kids. He remembered being mean and teasing her, biting her ankles when his fangs grew in, chasing her and Cora around the yard until they screamed.

"I had a stomach ache. I was sleeping at her house one night and me and Chloe ate too much candy so I had a stomach ache. Yvette and Daniel let me sleep in the whole day." She sniffled. "And that night...I was so confused, I… they woke us up and put me in their car with them and they started driving, but they weren't taking me home, and I started to cry because Yvette was crying and Daniel was driving so fast, and I kept asking when mom was coming to get me."

She closed her eyes and shook her head.

"They panicked. About the fire, as soon as it happened. They were scared the hunters were starting a war so they just ran."

"And they took you with them."

"They didn't know you were alive. I didn't know." There was a hint of guilt in her voice. "All they ever told me, for the longest time, was that you were gone and I was safe."

When Derek closed his eyes and pictured the span of years between then and now, they were like ghost memories, and white, empty of anything tangible. He had been gone and Cora had been safe.

Derek came around to where she was sitting on the floor. He crouched down in front of her.

"It's okay."

She kept her eyes down as he slid a hand sloppily over her head, pawing her the way their mother used to. She laughed a bit, leaning into it.

"Your phone's ringing," she said after a momen

He saw that it was Stiles calling, and though Cora would be able to hear him from down the street, he moved into the next room to answer.

"Derek Hale," she said into the speaker. "Scott, did I calltherightnumberrr?"

"Stiles...?" He heard her having a distant conversation with Scott in the background.

"Heyyy," she slurred. "Look, can you come here please and get me please cuz Scott is driving his super duper dirt bike home and I need a ride cuz' I'm a lil' bit wasted so can you come to Danny's house please?”

"Stay where you are."

***

When he pulled up to the house, there were groups of people walking and staggering away. Red cups littered on the lawn and smelled like cheap alcohol and there was laughter, loud music, boister pouring out of Danny's house.

And his eyes found Stiles sitting next to Scott and Isaac on the curb, her head in her hands. He smelled vomit.

"You couldn't have driven her home?" he asked Isaac.

"She made us call you."

Scott stared at him with eyes that might have turned yellow had there not been a group of girls walking past. He crouched down and took Stiles by the arms. Her head lolled a bit and he saw that she was pale, eyes bloodshot. Scott helped guide her up with one protective hand and then she only registered him when they were at eye level. Tired and sickly, she groaned,

"Derek." And she fell against his shoulder, letting him maneuver her into the front seat of the Camaro. When he got her buckle and shut the door, he heard Scott from behind him.

"Derek." He stood with his hands in fists. Isaac awkwardly paced behind him, kicking a cup across the lawn with his hands in his pockets.

"What, Scott?" He felt a weight leave his shoulders as he stared him down, somehow, like he was finally getting rid of old shit he was hanging onto. Like secrets.

"What are you doing?" Scott looked confused. He thrust a hand toward Stiles in the car.

"I'm taking her home."

"Why?"

He met Scott’s eyes and they did flash yellow. Derek huffed and looked beyond Scott's shoulder at the high school party where normal teenage kids were doing normal teenage things.

"You don't need to worry about her, alright? You're not her father."

"No,” Scott stepped forward, into Derek’s space. Territorial. “Her dad's the sheriff...so maybe he'd like to know about the murder suspect guy who's trying to get with his kid--"

Derek growled which startled Isaac, who started to softly whine behind them. He grabbed a fist full of Scott's shirt.

"You're going to assume what you want to assume, but you're wrong about it, Scott."

He felt his eyes flash red. Scott's jaw loosened as he slid out of Derek's grip. He knew instinctively that Stiles would punch the both of them for trying to argue about her when she couldn't contribute. He was done.

"Scott, let's just go," Isaac pleaded. “She’s fine.”

Scott just pushed past Derek, walking in the other direction. He smelled and felt the anger sizzle slowly away from him, and turned his attention back to Stiles, who had been watching them through the window with her eyes half-closed and forehead pressed against the glass.

He got into the car before she passed out completely. He drove carefully and slowly away from the party with the windows down to give her air. The people on the street looked twice at them as they cut past the emptying block.

She unbuckled herself and moved toward him with slow, wavering movements. It was as if she was a slow motion version of herself. She lied across the gearshift and put her head in his lap. Instantly, Derek took a hand off the wheel to smooth back her hair. She breathed hot, loud breath against his thigh, then he smelled the tears before they fell. He made turns down the right roads. The silence of the nighttime outside rolled past them. Soon, little, desperate gasps burst out of her, and he just kept running his hands through her hair, touching her face, wiping the wetness away. He didn’t know why she was crying, but it probably went much deeper than Scott’s overbearingness. She pressed her head so hard into his leg.

“Fuck,” she cursed softly through her stuttering breath. She shook when she cried, like it was a weight to bear the sobs, all the way home.

She brought up one hand to hold over her eyes as he lifted her out of the car, but then she demanded that he put her down and let her walk up the walkway. He held her shoulders straight and followed her crooked line toward the house. He had never actually passed through the threshold of her front door. He’d never seen her living room. He scanned the dark room as she angrily tore off her shoes and threw them down.

Her dad wasn't home-- a blessing, because she tripped up the stairs and sniffled the whole way to her bedroom.

He helped her out of her clothes and she buried her face in his shirt, naked and inhaling deeply, so he let her wear it to bed. When she slipped it on and tucked herself in, he left to get a glass of water from the bathroom. He smiled at the amount of bras that were hanging from the shower rod, and the mess that she’d made of the toothpaste, and the adderall bottle that she’d labeled, **SLOW DOWN.**

He crawled in and settled under the sheets with her, tucked tightly in his arm, rubbed her back softly. She closed her eyes.

"It's her birthday today. My mom's."

He kissed her head softly.

"I'm sorry," she said, rubbing tired eyes. “I never cry. I hate this.”

"You’re just drunk.”

"Bet my dad's...somewhere...drunker than me."

"You should have called me earlier."

"And you'd hang out and be sad with me?"

“Yeah.”

He pressed his forehead softly to hers and she sighed, her tone of voice growing more wistful as she fell. After a while, she spoke again, just a hum against his throat.

"You should be nicer to Cora," she said. "If I found out mom was alive, after all this time, I'd bake her...cakes and..."

For a while, he watched her eyes flutter open and shut. She kept trying to look at him instead of falling asleep. Her breath smelled like whiskey and salt. Her skin smelled like him, like his t-shirt.

"I’ll stay tonight.” He tugged her closer.

It rushed to his chest-- a flood of water that was both terrifying and clean. She had once been a trickle. Now she flowed through his hands and over his skin, and he slept with her face so close,  and he opened his mouth to let her in until his lungs were full of her water.

He hoped so much that the wolf was a secret fish, that he could swim with this and grow gills to breathe, because he loved her, probably, and it was drowning him.

***

The next thing he felt was her arms folding around his chest tight, sucking him to her, pulling him away from the stream of bloody water at his knees. Stiles knelt down with him and squeezed her scrawny arms until he was leaning involuntarily back toward her. He felt her stutter-sob against his shoulder. The others-- Cora and Isaac-- they looked away.

And Boyd stayed still, eyes open, lying dead in the flood of his loft floor.

“Derek,” she said against his skin.

“No.”

He wouldn’t hear it. He wouldn’t hear the words, it’s not your fault, even when she said them in his ear again and again. Instead he heard Isaac choking on moans and the sad, erratic shifting of his pulse.

He stayed there for so long, Boyd’s skin and blood began to dry under his nails

Then he moved away from Stiles and kept moving when she tried to snap back toward him. He moved away from her because it was the best thing to do. She already had bloody water on the hem of her nice, white shirt.

***

For two days after, he slept in his old house. The mattress and makeshift room he had set up smelled like someone else-- a squatter who had taken shelter here sometime after he forgot about the place, the skeleton of his home. If he thought about it, the warm, rushing feeling that comes from having a home still existed. He could feel it like snippets of movie in his mind. He closed his eyes and forced the images; the worn finish of the banister, the rug on the concrete floor of the basement, his bedroom wall riddled with fist-sized holes from angry teenage moments, the kitchen smelling like fresh meat and coffee every evening. Like a fix he couldn’t satisfy, the warmness was just wasting away and the smell of the rotting, burned wood took over before he could feel that rushing, wet and soft memory of home The home was gone.

If he really thought about it, what he needed to feel was Stiles’s hair on his face in the morning or the smell of her foul breath as she snored beside him. That was more like home than any half-destroyed estate could ever be, no matter how fucking stupid it sounded. He wasn’t a romantic-- never pined over much in his life. This was the consequence of tasting her, of letting her make him come, of letting her body be so close to his and letting her words twist him on the inside, of letting her be anything other than the human tag-along she was meant to be.

She came to him in her jeep a day after Boyd died. She stood outside and called his name on the dead lawn, but he stayed curled up on the mattress upstairs. When she gave up and drove off, he stretched his body out of the fetal position. He ripped apart his cell phone because her name kept appearing on the caller ID.

She festered inside of him.

***

Derek shrunk back from the alpha. He felt more like omega now, and the wolf rolled over, pretending to be dead like a dog doing endless tricks.

The alpha only wanted one thing. It became too hard, after 72 hours, to ignore.

When he crawled back through her window, it was such a relief to be inside her air again. She seemed restless, and shook herself awake as soon as he touched down on her floor.

“Is that you?” she slurred, rubbing her eyes.

He hummed a little, paced around the room, comfortable, but on edge.

“You’re making me nervous.”

He took his shoes off and then his shirt. He slipped out of his jeans and into the bed in a fluid motion, like magnet toward metal. She pulled herself down to him.

“You didn’t have to disappear.” She gripped his hip a little tighter, like he might run away. “If you wanna talk about Boyd...or...you know… “

“Stiles, you should stop letting me in here.”

She sort of sighed under her breath, but he heard the slight nervous increase of her heart.

“Technically, I don’t let you in here, you just kinda show up.”

“Tell me to leave,” he said sharply. “Tell me you want me to leave.”

“No, I don’t want you to leave. I’ve been friggen worried sick about you.”

“I wish you wouldn’t.” He heard himself come out so stoney, so cold, and he wanted her to push him away, push him out of bed, back out the window. He would go if she asked. He would probably do anything.

“Derek, just shut the hell up,” she barked. She sounded genuinely mad now.

He shut up.

After a while, she said.

“You didn’t kill Boyd, alright? And you’re not going to kill anyone else. Especially me. So you can drop the whole Edward-Cullen-I’m-no-good-for-you shit.”

He rubbed his hand over his face again and again until he could see spots and stars in the darkness. She kept gripping his skin tighter and tighter.

“You and Scott are the same, you know? You think that just because I’ve got no special powers, I’m just some goddamn damsel in distress and everyone’s gotta treat me like I’m a freakin china doll. I’m so sick of hearing it, so just don’t, okay?”

“But you’re not stupid, Stiles. You can’t think that this-- you and me-- is normal.”

Stiles sat up and pushed herself away. She hit her mattress with her fists.

“Oh my god,” she said through her teeth. “Quit brooding. Do you just not like me anymore, is that it? You’re trying to get rid of me? You’re being really fucking cryptic.”

He sat up and slipped his arm around her waist, dragging her right to him like she had after Boyd died. He touched the skin he could reach on her leg, in the same place where he’d first touched her in this room, months and months ago. He pressed his forehead into her back.

“I love you.”

She made a whining sound in her throat and he heard her heart go frantic, could practically feel it in her veins.

“Are you serious?”

“I can’t stay away. I’m trying and I can’t. I want you to know that.”

“I…” she trailed off, and in the silence, he felt happy being able to think it. God, he loved her. It was in his blood. “I don’t want you to stay away.”

“It’s different for me, Stiles.”

She breathed with him for a few moments, waiting for him to explain. He was too scared to say it directly, so he told her,

“Scott will never stop wanting Allison. She’s special to him-- not like...like normal high school girlfriends. She’ll be a part of him for the rest of his life. You know why that is?”

“It’s a wolf thing, isn’t it?”

“It’s a wolf thing.”

“And I’m your wolf thing, then?” Her voice was so surprised, so high pitched and full of anticipation. He didn’t know if it was excitement or dread or fear. He wished he could read her as easily as she understood him.

“You’re my…” He didn’t want to say the word _mate_ because it might scare her. “You’re my wolf thing.”

She twisted her body around, but he kept his hands still, feeling her move beneath him. She kissed him slowly, with her mouth closed. When she looked at him again, her eyes wouldn’t break the staring contest.

“Why me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well...well, what do I do?”

He laid her down, settling on top of her, sliding himself between her legs. Her heart, for some reason, slowed. He kissed her collarbone softly, then he started to slide away from her.

“You don’t have to do anything.”

He was going to leave, then, and lick his wounds, because he might have just put the final nail in the coffin. It couldn’t go on like this. Her hand flew out and stopped him from leaving.

“No...I….”

She pulled him urgently back to where he’d been before, settled in the heat between her legs. She touched his hair, his brow. She kissed him deeply, her tongue wet and alive in his mouth. She allowed his hands to tug away at her underwear so that she was exposed to him, flush against him.

“I want to.”

Stiles touched him, getting him hard in seconds, and reaching down to pull her fingers inside, stretching herself for him while he watched. His chest beat almost angrily as she edged her hips nervously toward him.

It would be a mistake to do this now.

But his movements were automatic.

Pulling her hips toward his, dragging his cock up and down through the center of her, tilting her forward so that she could watch as he moved himself inside her for the first time. She breathed heavily through her nose, staring down at the place where they were mated. She let her head roll back when their pelvises touched, and he was melting into the deepest, warmest home that ever existed. He couldn’t stop the harsh grunt that came out of him, but she quickly covered his mouth with her hand because her father was still asleep down the hall. He bent forward to rest his head on her chest.

“Are you okay?” he panted.

“Just keep going.”

She wrapped her arms around him so they were close together as he pulled back his hips. It must of hurt because she hissed. He tried to focus on touching her clit, making her feel good, but he could hardly feel anything but the absolute intensity of her wrapped around him like this. He started to shift a little, claws digging into the sheets beside them. He thrust in and out of her as slowly as possible, listening to the wonderful, wet sounds, and watching her eyes open and close with whatever she was feeling. She said little things when he rolled himself inside her, breath mangling with gasps. He felt her squirm when he pressed on her clit in small circles, pulling her hips down to fuck her more deeply.

“I’m coming--” she suddenly whispered, throwing him off guard as her hand came to rub herself between them. She burst around him, shaking and almost crying into her pillow. He felt a rush of wetness and he stopped moving, overcome with it. He wanted to howl. It took every ounce of restraint not to. He came as soon as she stopped throbbing around him, and he sagged with the greatest exhale he’d ever let go of, white and blinding and crystalline. He felt himself emptying inside her perfectly, pulsating like a heartbeat.

He stayed inside of her for a long time after. Eventually, she said,

“I think you’re my human thing.”


End file.
